The Scars Inside You

It is time.

Ravenstongue hasn't breathed a word of the purpose of this night to anyone. There's a twinge of guilt in her heart as she thinks about how she never even told Telamon what is to happen, how almost anything could possibly happen to her on this night and he might never know the truth of it.

But this is how it is supposed to be. This is between her and Grandfather, and Telamon would surely understand. This is the way things are supposed to be, she thinks. This is a matter of bloodlines.

So Ravenstongue steps out into the Mythwood and she wanders in between the trees, the air thick with the scents of soil, foliage, and fresh air. She closes her eyes and hears the whispers of Quelynos, just as she had since the night the curuchuil had dried on her chest. They urge her on, her steps on fallen leaves and fallen twigs barely registering in her mind as she follows the whispers' instructions like they are the wind beneath her raven wings.

The night sky turns to twilight fog. The stars vanish. Eluna is high in the sky, her light shining down onto the world around her, even if the world is shifting. She is not yet in Quelynos, but Ravenstongue is satisfied as she stops to admire the sunless twilight, the sky a contradiction of all that makes logical sense.

(She is home in this place,

where rhyme overrules reason,

where song is thought

and where melody is breath.)

She is not Ravenstongue here, a disguise spun for mortal men and tongues; she is Cor'lana of the Lúpecyll bloodline. She is the Feathered One's descendant, the true heir to his legacy.

A breath in, a breath out. Eyes to Eluna, feet on the ancient soil beneath her. It is time.

She feels his monstrous claws around her hands. His arms wrap around her and she closes her eyes with a smile as she feels his feathers press up into her back. "Did you have a nice walk?" Grandfather asks, his voice deep and melodious. Here, in this border between two realms, Cor'lana feels him for the first time since the summoning, only a few months ago. The messengers who he uses are a fine facsimile, but there is a rich comfort to feeling the genuine article.

"I did, Grandfather," she says, opening her eyes and spinning around in his arms as she presses her face tightly into his pale chest. His skin is cold on her cheeks, but she doesn't mind, especially as his claws wrap around her back and give her a little scratch on her bare skin there.

"You are wearing the same dress that you did that night," Grandfather replies gently, a hint of nostalgia in that tone. It had not been so long ago, but yet to Cor'lana, it truly did feel long ago. So much had happened since that night, after all.

Cor'lana squeezes him back, her violet eyes peering up at her ancestor. She smiles up at him, beholding his face that holds so much love and warmth for her. "I thought it was a nice callback," she says. She dares not to let go of him.

Nor does he. Grandfather just holds her there in his arms for a long moment, squeezed so tightly. She can sense he's holding back his strength, somehow, in the way that his body is tensed around her; he does not want to hurt her. "You are so beautiful, you know that?" he finally says. "I look forward to seeing you on your wedding day. But first... We have to do this."

They let go of each other, but Grandfather's monstrous claws take her hands as she draws away from him. "You understand that this will change you," he says softly. His violet eyes, the same color as hers, are normally difficult to glean any emotion, but Cor'lana sees a pain in them that unnerves her. "You will not be the same as before and never will be again."

She considers his words for only a moment. She had already changed from that nervous bookworm and former shut-in who came to Alexandria a year before. Change was simply a fact of life that she had come to embrace. After all, fear was what she left behind back in Rune.

"I understand, Grandfather," Cor'lana replies with a solemn nod. Her hands relax in the grip of her ancestor's claws.

Grandfather's eyes turn to a hard stare as she consents. Gone are the love and warmth in his eyes, replaced by an inscrutable stare. It is then that Cor'lana remembers that her ancestor is no mere ordinary being. He is old, older than she could likely ever comprehend. He is ancient like the soil beneath her feet.

And he is the Feathered One, with his monstrous claws around her hands.

For a moment and only a moment, she is afraid--afraid of him, afraid of what she's agreed to. But then she remembers that first night when she came home to her apartment and he accompanied her in the form of a messenger; how he sat by her bed and rubbed her back as he sang her the lullaby that had pulled her ancestors deep into the gentle embrace of sleep for millennia. In a world where her mother died by her own hands and there was no one left to love her, the Feathered One had appeared and offered her an unconditional love that had been missing in her heart for so long.

Of course he could never do her any wrong.

"It will hurt," the Feathered One says apologetically. His voice is full of pain. "But it is necessary, and it will only be a moment."

He closes his eyes. A mark forms on his chest similar to Cor'lana's in that it is shaped like a feather. But then more feathers appear around the first, and Cor'lana realizes that they are forming into the shape of a raven's tail--and then the tail leads down into a tree with roots that are interwoven in the style of knotwork, the feathers taking the place of the leaves in the tree. I am but one feather, Cor'lana thinks.

The mark on his chest brims with power, the black on his pale skin almost crawling in place. It reminds Cor'lana of a shiver in the cold, and she realizes that she has never seen her ancestor shiver from the cold, not once. The Feathered One touches his chest and the shivering mark pours down into his hands, the dark sloughing off his skin into a thin liquid as it comes to a rest in the palms of his claws. "You are my blood, Cor'lana," he says, "but you are many generations away from the roots of my tree. This will bring you closer."

He holds out his cupped claws, the dark liquid reflecting only a fraction of Eluna's light in the twilight sky. "The first part is to make the rest of your mark," he says, and he carefully pulls one hand away, dipping his claws into the inky fluid. He reaches out to her and touches her mark.

Then comes the pain. His claws sink into Cor'lana's chest, and her vision fogs from the pain. She whimpers, her consciousness barely teetering as she swears that he might push further into her, might break her and pull her heart out to feast on. He wouldn't! He's my Grandfather! she thinks, holding onto the thought like she is adrift in the sea of the Border Ethereal, and she is without wings to guide her and her beloved Telamon to safety again.

"You are so brave, my child," Grandfather says, and the pain dulls in her chest. Cor'lana pants as she looks up at the fey lord in front of her, able to see him again although her eyes are full of tears. There are tears running down his face too, just like they had on that night when he saw her in person for the very first time. She takes some comfort in that this hurt him as much as it hurt her.

But there is still more of that liquid in his other hand. That is clearly evident with a glance down, and as she looks back up at him from his cupped claw, he says, "Now you must drink."

He tips the liquid toward her lips. She feels it's warm and yet it's cold, the stuff thick yet very thin. And then she realizes as she tastes it that it is not just liquid: it is blood.

You have been lost for so long, she thinks, but then she realizes it is not her thought and it is not her voice. It is Grandfather's voice in her mind, a part of her head that feels like a dusty hallway prepared for occupants that never moved in. It's a sensation that rattles her, but yet, it is oddly comforting. You bear so much pain on your soul, my child. Your heart may be pure physically, but I can see the scars inside you. I can feel your pain, for it is mine and it is yours. The curse of madness that loneliness brings is what we both bear, and in time, you would have felt it too if you had never left your mother's home.

The blood runs empty from Grandfather's claws, and Cor'lana swallows the last drops of it that cling to the inside of her mouth. She has tasted her own blood before, and it's the same uncomfortable sensation this time in her throat. But then she closes her mind, and she wills herself to that dusty hallway, that place in her mind where Grandfather's voice is coming from.

It's a door, she realizes, and all Cor'lana has to do is open it. She does, and she beholds a forest of unspeakable beauty

(where day is not day

and night is not night,

where time is a mere suggestion

in a world that rejects logic.)

There is a large tree in a clearing, and it is there she sees his gardens, where she sees lines of silk rope hanging from smaller trees. She realizes these are clotheslines, but there no garments hanging from them, and the gardens are beautifully organized chaos of flowers she recognizes by sight and by memory from storybooks. (Why would there be? she thinks, as she realizes where she is. No one else lives here but him.) There is a door in the tree, and she opens it.

And there he is, her Grandfather, sitting in a rocking chair that is almost crude in its appearance inside this tree-home. Somehow she instinctively knows by looking that it was her ancestor's handiwork, one of his children who built it for him. It is covered in the childish scribblings from thousands of children playing with ink, and suddenly she feels so forlorn that she did not get to do the same; that she did not get to grow up here and practice her letters in a fit of mischief with Grandfather's rocking chair.

But the melancholy is temporary as Cor'lana sees Grandfather's smile. She runs into his arms and he holds her so tightly. He is warm and he is cold, but she doesn't mind that contradiction. Not one bit.

She never has. Never will.

"You are my greatest treasure that still lives, Cor'lana," he says into her ear as he holds her so tightly. His voice is so warm and so gentle. He's still holding back because she is a small fledgling and he is so much older, so much stronger, that he doesn't want to break her. "Now you have my power--or rather, the seeds of it."

She opens her eyes and she is no longer there in Grandfather's house.

She is no longer there in the hazy borderlands between Quelynos and Aeryth.

Instead, Cor'lana Lúpecyll lies in bed with her fiance, and she looks down to her chest.

There, graceful and sweeping dark lines adorn her skin, complementing the curuchuil mark that Ashlee set into her skin that night that was so long and not so long ago. They are lines that evoke the knotwork roots. The pain had brought such beauty that her eyes flood over with tears.

No longer is she a pretender. Now, she is the inheritor.

In the dead of night, Cor'lana Lúpecyll returns to sleep, and she dreams. She dreams of Eluna in the sky. She dreams of Quelynos. She dreams of Alud'rigan, the Feathered One.

She dreams of another life that could have been, where he brought her up as he did her ancestors in his tree-home. She dreams of his smile as she walks for the first time, his laughter as she says her first word ("Pothy," for he is there too in her dream despite the fact it does not make sense), and his tears of joy as he watches her use magic for the first time.

And as Eluna's noble father rises in the sky, she awakens no longer as Ravenstongue, an alias for a lonely girl on the brink of despair, but as Cor'lana, the name she had been born with and called for years before her memories were stolen.

Thank you, Grandfather. I love you, she says as she walks to that door in her mind and opens it.

She feels only love in return, as the loneliness in her heart that has been there--perhaps since the day she was born--has been banished. And that is all she's ever wanted.